Stephen Cave

Our lives are already enhanced by AI – or at least an AI in its infancy – with technologies using algorithms that help them to learn from our behaviour. As AI grows up and starts to think, not just to learn, we ask how human-like do we want their intelligence to be and what impact will machines have on our jobs?

Some of the world’s leading thinkers and practitioners in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will gather in Cambridge this week to look at everything from the influence of science fiction on our dreams of the future, to ‘trust in the age of intelligent machines’.

The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), a Cambridge-based research Centre exploring the nature and impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI), is joining the Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society (Partnership on AI), it was announced this evening.

Artificial intelligence has the power to eradicate poverty and disease or hasten the end of human civilisation as we know it – according to a speech delivered by Professor Stephen Hawking this evening.

Every generation has tried to be the one that outsmarts the Reaper. From the millennia-old Epic of Gilgamesh to the centuries-old story of the Spanish explorer, Ponce de Leon, who discovered Florida in his search for the fountain of youth, legends abound of how we might live forever.